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“... as the Earl of Chesterfield said, ‘he was taken by many at a distance for a gilt garland.’ George Brummell, an equally famous beau of a later day, would have thought that irredeemably vulgar. Yet Bath, a city in the ascendant, needed someone like Nash. When the 18th century came in it was half spa, half pleasure resort. The haut ton found Tunbridge ...”

“... was the recipient of Jewish mothering of an intensity rarely seen outside the early works of Woody Allen or Philip Roth. A la recherche has been characterised as a semi-autobiographical novel written by a Jewish homosexual, and narrated by a Gentile heterosexual with an inordinate interest in Jewishness and homosexuality. There is some truth in this, although ...”

“... had made. Kleinzahler was born in 1949 and grew up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across from the George Washington Bridge. He went to college in Wisconsin, but dropped out and drifted a while, before enrolling at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where his favourite 20th-century poet, Basil Bunting, happened to be teaching that year. Afterwards ...”

“... to the future. We knew this was happening, too. We just didn’t want to believe pollster George Gallup’s 1968 statistics that found the political views of voters between the ages of 21 and 29 no different from the views of those aged 30 to 49. ‘A lot of this talk about this group’s being a maverick generation must be considered ...”

“... as the letters, his poems were, of necessity, in the lower case. The column was illustrated by George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat, a comic strip that first came out in 1913 and that Cummings was mad about (he wrote the introduction to the first collection of the strip in book form in 1946). He loved the mad, Dada-inflected burlesque as well as the ...”

“... of England and the old Empire to talk freely to mad old Indians. Change involved the right of George Bernard Shaw to say that the long lying-in-state of the dead queen was a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in novels the end of restriction and the beginning of new ...”

“... he was ruthlessly selective. Gone was the eclecticism of turn-of-the-century scholars like George Saintsbury and Oliver Elton, and of surveys like the Cambridge History of English Literature. In The Great Tradition (1947), Leavis reduced the essential canon to only four writers, dismissing once-great names with scant ceremony, interpreting Fielding as ...”

“... with the national treasury on New Year’s Day 1959, resulted in the ongoing disaster of what Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, referred to as ‘the disposal problem’: a large cadre of former Batista torturers and enforcers. This restive core of fanatics includes Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles – terrorists by any credible definition – and ...”

“... and practice of liberal democracy, was intended, in the words of the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, to fulfil ‘the task of saving Europe for Western civilisation’. The reconstruction effort was driven by a growing fear that, without it, the Germans would become susceptible to Communist or neo-Nazi propaganda. The doctrine of collective guilt ...”

“... you may, Earl, honey. I am Lady Darlene.’ There are even touches of Gracie (or is it Woody?) Allen:   ‘Was your father weak, passive, absent from home a lot?’   ‘You mean before he died?’ There is also a glum, constant sense of history being erased by show business, or just business. Chloris Craig, in her elevated social position, must be ...”

“... of art they encounter – particularly the feelings they feel they ought not to have. She quotes George Steiner, that ‘most mandarin of critics’, on Edith Piaf’s ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’:‘The text is infantile, the tune stentorious, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive,’ Steiner begins stonily, yet ‘the opening bars, the ...”

“... century, culminating in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which inspired the New Republic to declare George W. Bush ‘the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself’. Wilson had begun to outline the American preference for regime change in unfriendly countries well before he declared war on Germany. Faced in late 1913 with revolution and the likely ...”

“... poetry from this preference, placing himself squarely between titillation and the abyss. Like Allen Tate’s narrator in The Fathers, he believes that ‘excessively refined persons have a communion with the abyss,’ and that civilisation is ‘the agreement, slowly arrived at, to let the abyss alone’. Davie arrived at this preference not slowly, it ...”

“... Yet his underhand involvement, of which the evidence happens to afford us a telling glimpse, in George Joyce’s enterprise of June is unlikely to have been an isolated moment of contact. Joyce was one of the ‘officer – agents’-captains, lieutenants and cornets – whose role in the emergence of the representative system Woolrych freely ...”

“... In Northanger Abbey, Austen enacts the conventional belief in the frivolity of dress by having Mrs Allen, Catherine’s chaperone, make embarrassing and comic remarks about finery – its details, its price – in every other utterance. At the same time, however, Henry – who isn’t laughed at – knows all about fashionable muslins, and discusses them ...”